Listen to the singer-songwriter’s Buddhist-legend-checking song, “Leaving LA,” found on his new LP, Pure Comedy.

either a remarkable 13-minute portrait of the artist as a self-loathing middle-aged man or, as the song describes itself, “some 10-verse, chorus-less diatribe,” that will horrify and alienate his fans. It imagines an encounter between [Misty] and the Buddhist demon Mara, who ridicules him for being “another white guy in 2017 who takes himself so goddamn seriously.” The moral of the story, he explains, “is that we all have to face the fear that we’re delusional. When you write songs and put them into the world, you’re vulnerable to criticism. The strange thing is, when I started doing this, I thought to myself, ‘I’m not gonna be one of those white guys living in a white-guy romantic fantasy – I’m gonna take myself to task.’ Fast-forward five years, and when people think of a clichéd, bearded, white-guy singer-songwriter, it’s my name that comes up. I set out to be a real human, not a cartoon character, and now I am the cartoon character…”

Rod Meade Sperry is Editorial Director of Lion's Roar's Special Projects and of LionsRoar.com. He is the editor of A Beginner’s Guide to Meditation: Practical Advice and Inspiration from Contemporary Buddhist Teachers, and co-author, with Miguel Chen, of I Wanna Be Well: How a Punk Found Peace and You Can Too, which comes out in Spring 2018.

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